Daily Archives: February 14, 2010

In this podcast, Bruce, Michael and Dale discuss the Republican desire not to be seen as the “Party of No”; China, the Euro, and the Dollar; and what seems to be a fundamental shift in the assertions of the AGW crowd. The direct link to the podcast can be found here.

The intro and outro music is Vena Cava by 50 Foot Wave, and is available for free download here.

As a reminder, if you are an iTunes user, don’t forget to subscribe to the QandO podcast, Observations, through iTunes. For those of you who don’t have iTunes, you can subscribe at Podcast Alley. And, of course, for you newsreader subscriber types, our podcast RSS Feed is here. For podcasts from 2005 to 2009, they can be accessed through the RSS Archive Feed.

Republicans: Are they going to go to the health care summit? And what about the “bi-partisan” jobs bill the put together. Do they still not “get it”?

Economy/Economics: Would China flex its economic muscle by selling a few billion in bonds to make a point? And what about Greece and the EU? What does that foretell for the US and the world? Are we really in a recovery?

Global Warming: An amazing interview with Dr. Phil Jones seems to indicate the beginning of a bit of a walkback.

The irony not to mention the hypocrisy contained in this clip (from Feb 13) can make one seriously wonder if the man who has proposed 10 years of huge deficit budgets that would put us in an unimaginable debt hole thinks he’s fooling anyone with this. It is simply breathtaking in its temerity and arrogance:

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

…

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

So are we warming at all? Besides Phil Jones admitting that there’s no statistically significant evidence for it since 1995, the article above casts more doubt:

Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.

“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.

Naturally, the usual suspects are sticking to the “global warming is definite” position. The article quotes Kevin Trenberth, who was involved in the Climategate scandal, as one of them. Another is the head of the Met Office that seems to be hellbent on working warming into their weather predictions.

We seem to have passed a tipping point in the last few weeks. At the very least we’ve moved from global warming/climate change being discussed as a quasi-religious cause being crammed down everyone’s throats to having some genuine debate about the data and the science.

Not to say there are not holdouts; some people won’t give up their religion easily. Most American legacy media outlets have been silent, for example, and the comments on the article above still contain the usual ears-in-fingers-I-can’t-hear-you entries. However, if the best the Daily Mail can come up with to defend global warming are those already caught up in controversies of their own, that in itself is an indicator of just how much the debate has changed.